As captain of the company, Chief Executive Officers have many challenges to navigate, but which one do you think ranks among the most difficult?

Is it managing the budget?

Hiring and firing decisions?

Staying on top of public perception?

Predicting the future direction of the business?

Not quite.

It’s execution.

As a partner of a consulting firm that specializes in human performance, we have worked with more than 10,000 high ranking organizational leaders and they all say one thing- what keeps them up at night is having their executive team play nice. Why? Because team is everything and it can literally make or break the company. In plain terms, a high-performance team as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts and it’s the CEO’s job to make the team function as a one.

Aligning the executive team can be a real challenge and the crux of it is two-fold: CEOs need to facilitate an environment where executives can trust each other and they need to create an organizational future that all of their employees are inspired by, have buy-in to, and are motivated to drive towards. When these elements are driving the team collaboration, I’ve seen unpredictable results unfold, over and over again.

The Corporate Vice President of a large publicly traded technology company with over 130,000 employees shared this about the work we did together: “Our coach asked us to write down things that we thought were impossible to achieve in five years. At the time, we had a good-sized team, we had tens of millions of users, we were happy. When the coach asked that question many people said ‘Oh, it would be awesome to have 100 million engaged and happy users’ but the question really was ‘What was impossible?’ What was transformative for me to learn or realize was that in five years, we had actually achieved all the impossible statements that we put in that list and that is truly transformational.”

To accomplish this level of ultimate performance, it takes a strong commitment from core leadership and an investment of time and capital to develop the operational structure needed to authentically build a high-performance organization.

And there is a training series at Legacy Transformational Consulting that we work with clients on in order to authentically achieve this – and the clients that have gone through the program experience outsized results.

Being a CEO comes with a number of challenges – many of which are difficult to anticipate or navigate. But by working with a group of trusted consultants who have worked with leaders that have been where you are, you’re giving yourself an advantage for problem-solving and successful execution. And by specifically investing time, energy and resources into aligning the executive team, you’re expanding your impact. It won’t just be you sharing the vision – you’ll also have a team of senior leaders sharing the vision with you and driving the entire company towards it.